Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT HELPING TEEN-AGE MOTHERS : ‘They Want To Be Better Parents Than They Had’

The Crittenton Center in Los Angeles is part of a national network founded 101 years ago to assist unwed mothers. Sharrell Blakeley is executive director of the L.A. center, which has been in operation for 70 years. It now serves neglected, abused adolescent girls, many of them pregnant.

We are in the family values business, but not in the polarized way that was discussed in the election.

For many families, there is no return to the traditional mom-and-pop, Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. We need to respect what is. We have single women raising families. How do we respect her and teach her how to be a better parent?

We’ve got three options: abortion, adoption and continuation of a pregnancy. All of the girls who come here and are pregnant have made a choice to have this child.

We have young women who come in here whose lives have been damaged. All of their lives there was no structure, no discipline, no ability to resolve conflict, nor were they ever loved in a way that set boundaries. Some struggle to develop body boundaries and they don’t have (the kind of) emotional boundaries that we learn within the family.

These are kids who have no hope. They see a father in prison, a mother maybe on drugs, a brother may have just been shot. Often there’s a sense of “I can leave some kind of legacy with a child, because I may not live past 25.”

The real issue for me is what do we do for her, and what do we do for that child? And then what do we do for all the others who are sitting around right now contemplating whether this is a choice they want to make?

These girls do not choose to become pregnant in order to go on welfare and become dependent; there’s no money in that, they recognize that. When they come here they all want to better themselves, they all want to be a better parent than what they had. The desire is incredible, they want to give more to their child, to be a better person, a productive citizen and to be a better parent.

Some of them fight structure and discipline when they get here, but they respond very well to it, very quickly, because it is what people want. It is a sign of being loved that someone has set some boundaries and said, “You’ll do your homework tonight, you won’t wear your slippers to school tomorrow, and you’ll feed your baby before you feed yourself.” People who write off young women who become pregnant in their teens, and think all they’re going to do is continue to have repeat pregnancies and deliver baby after baby, are inaccessible human beings. They’re not recognizing that we are all in this together. There is a reason for teen pregnancy, and much of it relates to the hopelessness of the world and their quest for someone to love them.

One of the things that we teach them is that babies don’t love, they take. And it’s a long time before a child loves a parent; sometimes you’re in your 30s and 40s before you can actually give back to a parent. So we have a child having a child and we have to turn the concept around and say that this baby isn’t here to love you; now what are you going to do to be a good parent and get on with your life?

There are three things that we focus on. First is education--studies have shown that if you get a degree you will not have a repeat pregnancy, because you see a light at the end of the tunnel. Second, a vocation--we start them immediately on some vocational plan, whether it’s cosmetology or computer literacy or whatever. We are taking them to the zoo next week, backstage at the zoo, so they can learn how to care for animals, how to get a job caring for animals. We take them to opportunities that they never thought possible.

The third thing we do is therapy--individual, group, incest survival, co-dependency, and every single day they’re involved in expressing and feeling and sharing. That’s the only way they are going to be able to recognize problems and then be able to do something about them. They haven’t learned to be in touch with their own feelings--in fact, they had to shut them down.

We’ve got girls who have graduated from here--one right up the street who graduated last year and now she takes two buses to get her baby to the baby-sitter and two more to get to her job at the bank, where she’s been promoted twice. Then she takes the four buses back; she’s been doing that for a year.

We have lots of kids who do that, and they get that here. We get them jobs, they learn to take a bus, they learn to get out there and start making it.

Another thing we focus on is sexuality and responsible sexual behavior. We had a play on date rape that had half our girls crying. It was an outside play that came in and they said, “We didn’t know we could say no.”

We also focus on relationships with their parents. For some of them it’s better to terminate that relationship than to go back to a difficult relationship.

Most of these girls who have been in foster homes, there’s no trust, they’ve learned to manipulate, they look around and see that people don’t come through for you. Our therapeutic services begin to help them fill up that black hole of unrequited love, and to begin to feel and trust again, and then they can give that back to their own child.

We want the abused, neglected girls who aren’t pregnant to see how hard it is, so we have them here together. It’s a deterrent.

These young women had parents who didn’t know anything. You need a driver’s license to drive a car and yet anybody can be a parent. Nobody is focusing on how significant that responsibility is. It is the single most important job we will ever undertake.

To get involved: Crittenton Center, (213) 225-4211.